State Aid to Agriculture in freland. 48 



Committees were given a main share in devising the schemes 

 which thej' were themselves to administer ; hence they must 

 go into all the questions at issue, think out the details, the 

 ways and means, and so evolve such a plan as they could hope 

 to \vork with practical success. This also w^as necessary. The 

 Irish, farmers, having been long left without much share in 

 local public affairs (they had County Councils only a year 

 before the Department came), were fonder of dealing with 

 problems in terms of loose, generalising rhetoric, than of 

 coming to close quarters with them, and thinking out their 

 thoughts about them in the light of actual effort and adminis- 

 trative difficulty. But now being given the power to devise 

 and administer schemes of their own, they are forced to 

 approach all questions with a sense of their practical difficulty, 

 and not from the standpoint of men who were unsympatheti- 

 cally criticising from outside measures not devised by them- 

 selves. The committeemen became each and all interested in 

 the success of the schemes they had framed. Instead of being 

 querulous critics of the Department they were enlisted as its 

 friends. The Department thus acquired the benefit of local 

 knowledge and opinion, while the local bodies themselves 

 gradually gained, through administrative experience, a sym- 

 pathetic understanding of the necessarily tedious process by 

 which sound reforms of the kind contemplated are achieved. 

 In this way the local leaders of opinion learnt patience, and 

 gained in sense, ballast, and forbearance. As ratepayers, 

 contributing almost half the cost of the schemes locally admin- 

 istered, the farmers of every district had a direct incentive not 

 to let their money go to loss by refusing to avail themselves of 

 the advantages offered ; in this way they are disciplined in 

 self-help. All this it is necessary to emphasise ; those of us 

 who were concerned in establishing the Department recognised 

 that its success would depend not only upon expei't skill and 

 scientific principles but on the attitude towards it of those 

 whom it was meant to benefit. The root idea of the Depart- 

 ment may be summed up as local initiative and central 

 direction ; the former to evoke and fortify the spirit of self- 

 reliance, enterprise, and responsibility in the people, and the 

 latter to prevent an indiscriminate multiplication of unrelated 

 local schemes. 



The conditions of agricultural education in the United 

 Kingdom at this time (1900) were extremely backward. 

 Whilst Great Britain had suffered from the neglect of rural 

 life consequent on the fact that primary and secondary 

 education were, and to a considerable extent still are, modelled 

 upon urban ideas and requirements, Ireland suffered much 

 more because of being a country where agriculture is the 



